With the advent of more robust electronic systems, advancements of mobile devices are becoming more prevalent. Mobile devices can provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, audio/video, and gaming functions. Mobile devices can include mobile stations such as cellular telephones, smart telephones, portable gaming systems, portable audio and video players, electronic writing or typing tablets, mobile messaging devices, personal digital assistants, and handheld computers.
Whereas in the past, such mobile devices typically accommodated either voice transmission (cell phones) or text transmission (pagers and PDAs), today's consumer often demands a combination device capable of performing both types of transmissions, including sending and receiving e-mail. Furthermore, these higher-performance devices can also be capable of sending and receiving other types of data including that which allows viewing and use of Internet websites. These higher level functionalities necessarily require greater user interaction with the devices through included user interfaces (UIs) which may have originally been designed merely to accommodate making and receiving telephone calls and sending messages over a related Short Messaging Service (SMS). As the available functions of electronic devices continue to increase, the functionality of the UIs also needs to increase. Because electronic devices often have limited space for input devices and display screens, the size of the keyboard, the function buttons, the display and other components of the electronic device can be compromised to fit the switch panel on the electronic device. As might be expected, suppliers of such mobile electronic devices and the related service providers are anxious to meet these customer requirements, but the demands of these more advanced functionalities have in many circumstances rendered the traditional user interfaces unsatisfactory, a situation that has caused designers to have to improve the UIs through which users input information and control these sophisticated operations.